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Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Criminal Justice Lunchtime Talk -- On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

Forty years in, the War on Drugs has done almost nothing to
prevent drugs from being sold or used, but it has nonetheless
created a little-known surveillance state in America’s most
disadvantaged neighborhoods. Arrest quotas and high-tech
surveillance techniques criminalize entire blocks, and transform
the very associations that should stabilize young lives--family,
relationships, jobs--into liabilities, as the police use such
relationships to track down suspects, demand information, and
threaten consequences. Alice Goffman spent six years living in one such neighborhood
in Philadelphia, and her close observations and often harrowing
stories reveal the pernicious effects of this pervasive policing.
In her new book, On the Run, Goffman introduces us to an
unforgettable cast of young African American men who are caught up
in this web of warrants and surveillance--some of them small-time
drug dealers, others just ordinary guys dealing with limited
choices. All find the web of presumed criminality, built as it is
on the very associations and friendships that make up a life,
nearly impossible to escape. We watch as the pleasures of
summer-evening stoop-sitting are shattered by the arrival of a
carful of cops looking to serve a warrant; we watch--and can’t help
but be shocked--as teenagers teach their younger siblings and
cousins how to run from the police (and, crucially, to keep away
from friends and family so they can stay hidden); and we see, over
and over, the relentless toll that the presumption of criminality
takes on families--and futures. While not denying the problems of the drug trade, and the
violence that often accompanies it, through her gripping accounts
of daily life in the forgotten neighborhoods of America's cities,
Goffman makes it impossible for us to ignore the very real human
costs of our failed response—the blighting of entire neighborhoods,
and the needless sacrifice of whole generations. Read an excerpt from the book here:http://harpers.org/archive/2014/03/hustle-and-flow/Lunch will be provided.